Most offices know what their copier costs and have no idea what printing costs. Those are different numbers, and the gap between them is usually where the money is.
This takes an afternoon. You do not need software or a consultant.
Step 1: Pull twelve months of invoices
Everything printing-related, into one spreadsheet, by month:
- Equipment lease or rental payments
- Service and maintenance agreements
- Individual repair invoices
- Toner and supply orders, including the emergency ones bought at retail
- Paper, envelopes, labels, specialty stock
- Anything sent out to a print shop
Eighteen months is better than twelve if you have it, because it captures a full seasonal cycle. Tax season, open enrollment and year-end mailings all distort a single quarter.
The out-sourced print line and the emergency toner line are the two most people forget, and they are often the two most revealing.
Step 2: Get your meter reads
Every business copier counts impressions and splits them by color and mono. Your provider collects this automatically in most cases; if not, the totals are on the control panel.
Record, per device: total impressions, color impressions, and mono impressions, by month.
If you have no history, start now and set a baseline. An audit you can only run once is worth less than one you can run every year.
Step 3: Divide
Total annual printing cost, divided by total annual impressions, gives you your real cost per page. Not the number on your lease. Not the number a salesperson quoted. Yours.
Then do it separately for color. Color pages typically run several times the cost of mono, which means a small percentage of color volume can account for a large share of spend.
Step 4: Look at the color ratio
This is where the surprises are. Pull the percentage of your total volume that prints in color, then ask what is actually in it. Internal drafts, emails, meeting agendas and reference copies do not need color, and most of them get it because the machine defaults to it.
Setting the driver default to black and white, and leaving color as a deliberate choice, is a fifteen-minute change that costs nothing and shows up on the next meter read.
Step 5: Look at each device separately
Compare each machine's monthly volume against what it was specced for.
Running far under capacity? You are paying for a machine sized for a business you no longer are, or you have more devices than the office needs. Two lightly used copiers usually cost more than one properly sized one.
Running far over? You are paying overage rates and wearing the machine out early. Moving up a class typically costs less than the overages.
Barely used at all? Somebody bought it for a reason that has since ended. Every office has one.
Step 6: Count the time
Toner ordering, jam clearing, calling for service, explaining the machine to whoever is standing in front of it confused. This never appears on an invoice and it is not small.
What to do with the answer
You will end up with three things: a real cost per page, a list of devices that are the wrong size, and a color ratio that is probably higher than you assumed.
If the total is spread across a lease payment, a service contract, supply invoices, overage charges and an annual escalator, an all-inclusive flat rate is worth pricing against it, ours covers equipment, all toner, all parts and labor, every service call and preventive maintenance in one monthly line, from $150 black and white and $225 color. If the total is already low and stable, it may not be, and we will tell you that.
Run this every year. Volumes drift.